One thing I would suggest here, folks, and this is something that happens ALL the time in the media.

They publish ONE study with a scary or semi-scary result and they act like it's unquestioned fact and the world is ending.

Don't blindly swallow it. It's one study, folks.

There have been dozens of studies published about these issues. The Right Wing has purely political reasons for ignoring, or discrediting them. Since the chief purveyors and supporters of the anti-scientific campaign are organizations like energy companies and the Koch Bros., their obvious reason for doing so is greed.

There have been dozens of studies published about these issues. The Right Wing has purely political reasons for ignoring, or discrediting them. Since the chief purveyors and supporters of the anti-scientific campaign are organizations like energy companies and the Koch Bros., their obvious reason for doing so is greed.

The article in this thread is about "a study." I will not shoot wet brown gobs across the room over one study. This thread is about one topic, not "these issues." You're lumping in things not even on this thread. Note the article, "a first of it's kind study." There is no plural here. One study. Uno. Me no poopie in panic.

The dead zone that has formed in the Gulf of Mexico this summer is smaller than predicted, but is still larger than average, spanning an area roughly the size of Connecticut. This zone, an area without oxygen and almost completely devoid of life that crops up every summer, covers 5,840 square miles (15,125 square kilometers), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

In June, NOAA predicted the dead zone would be at least 20 percent larger this summer, expecting it to take up at least 7,286 square miles (18,871 square km).

Dead zones are the indirect result of nutrients, largely from fertilizer use, running off into rivers and then into bodies of water such as the gulf. Once these excess nutrients reach the ocean, they fuel algae blooms. The algae then die and decompose in a process that consumes oxygen and creates oxygen-free areas where fish and other aquatic creatures can't survive. This zone can have serious impacts on commercial and recreational fisheries on the Gulf Coast, causing fish die-offs.

But the dead zone this summer, the time of year when the phenomenon occurs, is larger than average: Over the past five years, the average dead zone has covered 5,176 square miles (13,405 km), according to NOAA. That's more than twice the 1,900-square- mile (4,921 square km) goal set by the Gulf of Mexico / Mississippi River Watershed Nutrient Task Force, a group that seeks to reduce the size of this lifeless area, according to NOAA.

The dead zone that has formed in the Gulf of Mexico this summer is smaller than predicted, but is still larger than average, spanning an area roughly the size of Connecticut. This zone, an area without oxygen and almost completely devoid of life that crops up every summer, covers 5,840 square miles (15,125 square kilometers), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

In June, NOAA predicted the dead zone would be at least 20 percent larger this summer, expecting it to take up at least 7,286 square miles (18,871 square km).

Dead zones are the indirect result of nutrients, largely from fertilizer use, running off into rivers and then into bodies of water such as the gulf. Once these excess nutrients reach the ocean, they fuel algae blooms. The algae then die and decompose in a process that consumes oxygen and creates oxygen-free areas where fish and other aquatic creatures can't survive. This zone can have serious impacts on commercial and recreational fisheries on the Gulf Coast, causing fish die-offs.

But the dead zone this summer, the time of year when the phenomenon occurs, is larger than average: Over the past five years, the average dead zone has covered 5,176 square miles (13,405 km), according to NOAA. That's more than twice the 1,900-square- mile (4,921 square km) goal set by the Gulf of Mexico / Mississippi River Watershed Nutrient Task Force, a group that seeks to reduce the size of this lifeless area, according to NOAA.

I was watching a Georgia peach farmer on the news yesterday talking about how last year the drought destroyed his crop and this year excessive rain is destroying his crop.

Still waiting for the Red Staters to figure out how to add it all up.

Blindly accept alarmism? If global warming is behind every fluctuation in climate, then I guess it also caused the drying up of the natural harbor near the Great Pyramids and the unusual wet years on the Great Plains in the 1910s and early 1920s that encouraged over-farming before the Dust Bowl and the unusual 10+ years of extreme drought and unusually hot temperatures after the unusually wet period which brought on Dust Bowl conditions and killed thousands from dust pneumonia.

All too often life is a catch-22. Things people use to help things grow and not be devoured by insects to feed people then cause an effect somewhere else.

No! There is a simple and perfect balance out there with no unintended side effects. Only progressives know what it is. And they can't show it to you until you give them control over every aspect of your life.

No! There is a simple and perfect balance out there with no unintended side effects. Only progressives know what it is. And they can't show it to you until you give them control over every aspect of your life.

Is there some sort of competition to see how many strawmen can be crammed into a single post?

No! There is a simple and perfect balance out there with no unintended side effects. Only progressives know what it is. And they can't show it to you until you give them control over every aspect of your life.

It involves destruction of industry and return to "green" living which involves third world squalor and having a gathering-based food economy, amirite?!

All too often life is a catch-22. Things people use to help things grow and not be devoured by insects to feed people then cause an effect somewhere else.

The great turning point in the modern history of corn, which in turn marks a key turning point in the industrialization of our food, can be dated with some precision to the day in 1947 when the huge munitions plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, switched over from making explosives to making chemical fertilizer. After World War II, the government had found itself with a tremendous surplus of ammonium nitrate, the principal ingredient in the making of explosives. Ammonium nitrate also happens to be an excellent source of nitrogen for plants. Serious thought was given to spraying America's forests with the surplus chemical, to help the timber industry. But agronomists in the Department of Agriculture had a better idea: spread the ammonium nitrate on farmland as fertilizer. The chemical fertilizer industry (along with that of pesticides, which are based on the poison gases developed for war) is the product of the government's effort to convert its war machine to peacetime purposes. As the Indian farmer activist Vandana Shiva says in her speeches, "We're still eating the leftovers of World War II."

Yeah. There are no alternatives. We must destroy the land to save ourselves, even though destroying the land eventually will destroy us. We must destroy the oceans in order to survive even if, unfortunately, destroying the oceans eventually destroys us. But the oceans are far away. Who cares? We're just not clever enough to figure out some other way to do it, I guess. And we certainly wouldn't want to upset the profit models of Conagra and Archer Daniels Midland.

^^ That didn't answer anything I said and is a false dichotomy. The point is that everything has a consequence of some kind. That we aren't using a different technique isn't necessarily the result of a grand corporate conspiracy. Perhaps it's just we don't have an affordable alternative yet. And for all we know, alternatives may prove to be even more destructive.

^^ That didn't answer anything I said and is a false dichotomy. The point is that everything has a consequence of some kind. That we aren't using a different technique isn't necessarily the result of a grand corporate conspiracy. Perhaps it's just we don't have an affordable alternative yet. And for all we know, alternatives may prove to be even more destructive.

It's not complex. We don't explore alternatives because of greed. Simple.

Heads of lettuce may not seem life changing, but when you grow 3 million of them each year, the result can reinvigorate an entire area.

Such is the idea behind Green City Growers Cooperative’s greenhouse in Cleveland. At three-and-a-quarter acres, the greenhouse spans the equivalent of three football fields.

“It’s one of the largest local food initiatives in the United States,” said Mary Donnell, Green City Growers’ chief executive officer. It also ranks as the nation’s largest food production greenhouse in a core urban area.

Green City Growers Cooperative is a for-profit, worker-owned company that operates under the umbrella of parent company Evergreen Cooperatives. Although working at a grass-roots level, the organization has a highly structured, corporate management system with boards of directors and layers of chief executive officers.

Evergreen, launched in 2008, operates two other green businesses besides Green City Growers — a laundry company and solar-energy company. It aims for “building businesses, hiring from the neighborhoods where they’re located and then distributing profits back to employee members over time, which would help build financial assets and help transform lives and transform neighborhoods,” said Donnell.

Each business operates independently, with its own financing and management.

The idea for the economic revitalization project began when local institutions, including the Cleveland Foundation, University Hospitals, the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University, began meeting to discuss area poverty, said Donnell.

After realizing that the surrounding neighborhoods housed 43,000 residents with a median income under $18,500, the institutions came together to figure out how to use their buying power to create jobs. Cleveland is historically supportive of the local food movement, said Donnell, and founders saw opportunity in the ability to provide local food year round.

Washington, DC--(ENEWSPF)--March 5, 2014. The City of Eugene, Oregon, became the first community in the nation to specifically ban from city property the use of neonicotinoid pesticides, which have scientifically linked to the decline of honey bee colonies. The passage of the resolution came just one week after the Oregon state legislature passed a pollinator protection bill that removed language requiring the restriction of neonicotinoid pesticides, and includes instead a weaker requirement to set up a task force that will examine the possibility of future restrictions. In addition to neonicotinoid restrictions, the City’s resolution also expands Eugene’s pesticide-free parks program and now requires all departments to adopt integrated pest management (IPM) standards.

Vonnegut wrote a book about that called Galapagos where man eventually evolves beyond his "too big brain" because it's causing him so many problems. Here's a synopsis of part of it from Wiki:

Galápagos is the story of a small band of mismatched humans who are shipwrecked on the fictional island of Santa Rosalia in the Galápagos Islands after a global financial crisis cripples the world's economy. Shortly thereafter, a disease renders all humans on Earth infertile, with the exception of the people on Santa Rosalia, making them the last specimens of humankind. Over the next million years, their descendants, the only fertile humans left on the planet, eventually evolve into a furry species resembling seals: though possibly still able to walk upright (it is not explicitly mentioned, but it is stated that they occasionally catch land animals), they have a snout with teeth adapted for catching fish, a streamlined skull and flipper-like hands with rudimentary fingers (described as "nubbins").

Humans are a strange lot. We have the intelligence to put rovers on Mars and yet the lizard and primate parts of our brains are still fully operational.

37 Million Bees Found Dead In Ontario, Canada After Planting Large GMO Corn Field

Millions of bees dropped dead after GMO corn was planted few weeks ago in Ontario, Canada. The local bee keeper, Dave Schuit who produces honey in Elmwood lost about 37 million bees which are about 600 hives.

“Once the corn started to get planted our bees died by the millions,” Schuit said. While many bee keepers blame neonicotinoids, or “neonics.” for colony collapse of bees and many countries in EU have banned neonicotinoid class of pesticides, the US Department of Agriculture fails to ban insecticides known as neonicotinoids, manufactured by Bayer CropScience Inc.

Two of Bayer’s best-selling pesticides, Imidacloprid and Clothianidin, are known to get into pollen and nectar, and can damage beneficial insects such as bees. The marketing of these drugs also coincided with the occurrence of large-scale bee deaths in many European countries and the United States.

Nathan Carey another local farmer says that this spring he noticed that there were not enough bees on his farm and he believes that there is a strong correlation between the disappearance of bees and insecticide use.

In the past, many scientists have struggled to find the exact cause of the massive die-offs, a phenomenon they refer to as “colony collapse disorder” (CCD). In the United States, for seven consecutive years, honeybees are in terminal decline.

US scientists have found 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax and pollen, lending credence to the notion that pesticides are a key problem. “We believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies,” said Jeffery Pettis, of the ARS’s bee research laboratory.

The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute over 30 billion to the global economy.

A new study published in the Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that neonicotinoid pesticides kill honeybees by damaging their immune system and making them unable to fight diseases and bacteria.

After reporting large losses of bees after exposure to Imidacloprid, banned it for use on corn and sunflowers, despite protests by Bayer. In another smart move, France also rejected Bayer’s application for Clothianidin, and other countries, such as Italy, have banned certain neonicotinoids as well.

After record-breaking honeybee deaths in the UK, the European Union has banned multiple pesticides, including neonicotinoid pesticides.

Monsanto is the company that made Agent Orange and dioxin. Now, on their website, they call themselves the "Sustainable Agriculture" company. In other words, for a couple of bucks, they would kill their own mothers.

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than two out of five American honeybee colonies died in the past year, and surprisingly the worst die-off was in the summer, according to a federal survey.

Since April 2014, beekeepers lost 42.1 percent of their colonies, the second highest loss rate in nine years, according to an annual survey conducted by a bee partnership that includes the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

"What we're seeing with this bee problem is just a loud signal that there's some bad things happening with our agro-ecosystems," said study co-author Keith Delaplane at the University of Georgia. "We just happen to notice it with the honeybee because they are so easy to count."

But it's not quite as dire as it sounds. That's because after a colony dies, beekeepers then split their surviving colonies, start new ones, and the numbers go back up again, said Delaplane and study co-author Dennis vanEngelsdorp of the University of Maryland.

What shocked the entomologists is that is the first time they've noticed bees dying more in the summer than the winter, said vanEngelsdorp said. The survey found beekeepers lost 27.4 percent of their colonies this summer. That's up from 19.8 percent the previous summer.

Seeing massive colony losses in summer is like seeing "a higher rate of flu deaths in the summer than winter," vanEngelsdorp said. "You just don't expect colonies to die at this rate in the summer."

Oklahoma, Illinois, Iowa, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Maine and Wisconsin all saw more than 60 percent of their hives die since April 2014, according to the survey.

"Most of the major commercial beekeepers get a dark panicked look in their eyes when they discuss these losses and what it means to their businesses," said Pennsylvania State University entomology professor Diana Cox-Foster. She wasn't part of the study, but praised it.

Delaplane and vanEngelsdorp said a combination of mites, poor nutrition and pesticides are to blame for the bee deaths. USDA bee scientist Jeff Pettis said last summer's large die-off included unusual queen loss and seemed worse in colonies that moved more.

Dick Rogers, chief beekeeper for pesticide-maker Bayer, said the loss figure is "not unusual at all" and said the survey shows an end result of more colonies now than before: 2.74 million hives in 2015, up from 2.64 million in 2014.

That doesn't mean bee health is improving or stable, vanEngelsdorp said. After they lose colonies, beekeepers are splitting their surviving hives to recover their losses, pushing the bees to their limits, Delaplane said.